Нил Стивенсон - Termination Shock

It turned out that Gopinder was into kabaddi. Laks had been aware of the existence of this sport for a long time, but only because his uncles were wont to keep live feeds of it running in their gas stations in the evenings, when it was morning in the Punjab. It was militarized tag, basically. There was no equipment. It was played in a field with a line drawn across the middle. Each round—which was called a “raid”—consisted of a single attacker from one team squaring off against a squad of four defenders from the opposing side. The attacker started at the midline. The defenders linked arms to form a sort of moving wall that generally stayed as deep as possible in their end of the field. At the start of the raid, the attacker advanced across the line and attempted to tag as many defenders as possible in the time available before retreating back across the line. As soon as any defender got tagged, though, they would break free from the line and try to detain the attacker by grappling with him, to prevent the attacker from returning “home” before time ran out.

In a modern implementation, time would have been kept track of by a referee with a stopwatch who would blow the whistle after sixty seconds or whatever. But kabaddi was a lot older than stopwatches, or the concept of referees for that matter, and so they kept time in a different way: the attacker was not allowed to breathe. As soon as he stepped across the line he would begin to chant “kabaddi kabaddi.” As soon as he stopped, the raid was over. If he’d made it back across the line after tagging someone, points were scored, but if he’d run out of oxygen—for example because he’d got pulled into a wrestling match—the raid failed.

As with seemingly every other sport, there were leagues and age brackets and rankings and uniforms and endorsements and all the rest. Punjabi kids played it all the time, in the way that suburban West Coast kids played soccer, but it was also popular in other parts of India. Gopinder had been playing kabaddi since childhood. Indeed, this was how he’d gotten involved in gatka, for you could think of gatka and kabaddi as both belonging to a constellation of “Sikh pastimes derived from martial origins” and it was common to see sports festivals and tournaments where demonstrations of gatka alternated on the same field with rounds of kabaddi, all announced with lung-bursting enthusiasm through the same radically overdriven sound system. Anyway, Gopinder was pretty good at kabaddi and belonged to an adult league team in Chandigarh. He had invited Laks to attend some of the competitions and even to try out for the team, but this was not the right time for Laks to take up an entirely new sport.

As you would expect, people who were serious about kabaddi spent a lot of time holding their breath and were good at dealing with hypoxia. So of course Gopinder was fascinated by the breathing apparatus. During their early experiments on the field, Gopinder was, of course, better able to cope with its effects than Laks.

“Adrenaline will take you a long way!” was the verdict of a completely random boy in cricket whites who had wandered over to observe. On second glance, maybe “young man” was how most people would describe this fellow; he was a junior coach, or something. Tall and athletic enough that he felt completely unafraid to stroll over and bother the warlike Punjabis. Or maybe he felt that the cricket bat in his hand would keep him safe. He introduced himself as Ravi. Laks startled him, not necessarily in a bad way, by responding in fluent English. Once they had got through the preliminaries, Ravi just asked, straight out, “Are you training to fight up at the Line?” Laks had to admit that they were, since it seemed just idiotic to deny it. There was a certain amount of basic honesty and righteousness that went with striving toward miri piri . Ravi grinned and told him that it was “cool” that this was so. Laks assumed at first that Ravi was a rich boy, since he had that kind of self-assured nature, but on second thought he wouldn’t be working as a junior coach if that were the case.

Ravi kept coming over as days went on. He put on the breathing apparatus and went for a jog around the cricket oval and nearly fell over dead. He asked detailed questions about stick fighting and whether any of the techniques would work with a cricket bat.

At the same time as all this, Laks was laying in a stock of good rattan. This was a better material than bamboo for actual, as opposed to simulated, fighting. It was heavier and more solid. When it broke, which was rarely (you could bend it nearly in half if you were strong enough), it split into a sort of stiff broomlike structure instead of just creasing and buckling like bamboo. It was a bit exotic—the best stuff came from Southeast Asia—but not that hard to obtain once he had put his mind to it.

He invested in a clever little camping saw, small enough to be folded up and slipped into a backpack, and some other simple woodworking necessaries: scraps of sandpaper, a little pocketknife, a whetstone. Ranjit turned out to know a leatherworker—a profession that Hindus tended to avoid but that was perfectly acceptable to persons of their faith. This fellow knew how to stitch leather coverings for the sticks. These were not absolutely necessary, but they were an improvement over naked rattan. At his suggestion needles, punches, and stout waxed thread made their way into Laks’s kit.

Once he’d broken the nasty habit of splurging on Marriotts in Amritsar, he’d husbanded his money carefully. But now that a clear end to his journey was in sight he spent some on warm clothing and a few other items that might come in handy at the Roof of the World.

The time of his departure could hardly be kept secret from the community of the gurdwara, since he had accepted the offer of a ride to Shimla from Jasmit, a truck driver who happened to be headed that way, and Jasmit was nothing if not talkative. They were supposed to get underway at six o’clock in the morning. Inevitable delays and friction pushed that back to eight. The point of departure was an alleyway that ran behind the gurdwara and served, among other uses, as an informal loading dock for the kitchen. A surprising number of now familiar faces were there to see him off. Laks trudged up the alley bent under a fully loaded backpack and carrying a long bundle of rattan sticks. Or at least that was the case until the weight was lifted from his hand by one who had fallen in step beside him. He looked up in surprise to see Gopinder, his sparring partner, shouldering a duffel bag. He was dressed in what passed for warm clothing in Chandigarh but was probably a one-way ticket to hypothermic shock where Laks was going. “I can carry part of that load, brother,” he said, taking the stick bundle in his free hand.

This should not have been such a total surprise. Gopinder had put himself through a lot of physical discomfort training in that breathing rig and was at least as altitude-adapted as Laks. But it caused Laks to start crying with astonishing suddenness. Blurry then was his view of the Uighur family, awaiting him by the kitchen’s back door. He hadn’t seen them in a couple of weeks. They’d been adopted by a local mosque that had evidently been looking after them well. They looked healthier. Ilham seemed to have grown three inches and put on fifty pounds. He was wearing a Kullu cap—a cylindrical hat of heavy wool, common where Laks was going. Laks assumed it was just a symbolic gesture until Ilham hauled a bag—smaller by far than that of Laks or Gopinder—out of the car that had brought them here and commenced a long series of farewells to his mother, granny, and siblings.

Laks was just pulling himself together when Ravi came striding up the alley. His rolling suitcase, designed for polished airport floors, kept trying to jerk his shoulder out of its socket as its cheap skateboard wheels snagged on breaks in the pavement. He had shoulder-holstered his cricket bat so that its handle projected up behind his head, making him look (as he was no doubt well aware) like a character in a movie. “I have never seen the mountains,” he explained, “except from a great distance. I thought, what could be the harm in accompanying you at least part of the way?”